There’s a figure sitting inside most accounting firms that very few of them go looking for.
How many clients actually use the client portal?
Not how many were sent an invite. Not how many logged in once and never came back. How many use it, properly, as the place where information changes hands.
For plenty of firms, the honest answer would sting. Because a secure portal that clients avoid isn’t secure. It’s just empty. The sensitive documents are still travelling by email, exactly where nobody wanted them.
Johnston Carmichael, the largest independent firm of Chartered Accountants and Business Advisers in Scotland, did go looking. With over 800 people across 13 locations and more than 16,000 clients, the stakes were high. What they found will be familiar to many practices:
“We found our existing client portal solution to be very basic, clunky, and not intuitive for users. As a result, less than 10% of our client base used the portal, they often found workarounds or reverted to email.”
Less than 10%. Everyone else quietly opted out of a system built for them.
The workaround economy
When clients go around a portal, staff follow. They have to. The work still needs doing.
“Internally, our Client Relationship Managers also used alternative mediums to communicate with clients, which often lead to confusion and frustration.”
This is how one source of truth becomes several. Some files in the portal. Some in an inbox. Some in a colleague’s inbox. Nobody quite sure which version is current.
Even the information that did reach the portal wasn’t easy to find:
“Information was unstructured in our existing portal, just a list of folders, which contained various types of information e.g., communications, client information uploads, draft & final accounts, as well as completed returns. Additionally, duplicate files were often saved under the same name, which resulted in version control issues.”
A list of folders. It’s the default design of a lot of portal software, and it treats a completed return and a passing message as the same kind of thing.
The cost wasn’t just admin. “The lack of adoption by clients to engage with us digitally was resulting in inefficiencies and increased costs.”
It was commercial too. “We were concerned that we could potentially lose clients if we could not provide a ‘easy’ way of doing business with us.”
That’s the part the profession rarely says out loud. Clients don’t leave over one clunky upload. They leave when doing business with you starts to feel like hard work.
Choosing deliberately
Johnston Carmichael didn’t swap one tool for another on a whim. They went to tender with a long list: electronic document approvals, bulk file requests, a comprehensive audit trail, detailed reporting, single sign-on for staff and an API to connect with their other systems.
Yvonne Irwin, Director Client Service & Projects at Johnston Carmichael, explains the brief:
“Providing basic sharing of information securely was a given, but we also wanted to enhance client service and improve our internal processes to support the digitalisation of our services. The project team were unanimous in the decision to select Glasscubes as our partner.”
Secure sharing as a given. That’s the right bar. Security is the minimum, not the selling point.
What changed
“Since the launch we have seen an increase in the uptake of both clients and staff, compared to our previous system. It has saved our firm time, is ‘easy to use’, and has been especially successful for our audit business line and their clients.”
Uptake. The exact measure the old portal was failing on.
Ewan Bolt, Head of Digital Solutions at Johnston Carmichael, puts the wider point plainly:
“More and more data is being processed and past between stakeholders digitally – a best in class system is critical to successfully engage with your stakeholders and client base. For that reason, we would recommend Glasscubes.”
The question for every firm isn’t whether its portal is secure. It’s whether anyone is actually in it.
